Outlaws Inc. Page 4

  Whether he foresaw it or not, it was a looters’ charter. As if a whistle had sounded, the quartermasters’ stores from Vladivostok to Vitebsk, and all the air and weapons bases across Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, became a January sale. Selling at low, low cash prices to the right people—and that meant more or less anyone with the wherewithal to come knocking—lined the pockets of the sellers (with the battalion commander inevitably taking an 80 percent cut for turning a blind eye and signing the docket) and gave the buyers access to weapons-grade material for a fraction (usually less than 10 percent) of the guideline market value. Every serviceman with access to equipment, from high explosives, guns, and ammo down to night-vision gear and regulation thermal vests, liberated what he could. According to senior Moscow military analyst Colonel Oleg Belosludtsev, “Freelance arms merchants took over in cahoots with army officers, plundering the vast surplus stocks and selling wherever buyers could be found.”

  “It might not have been a written memo,” says historian Dr. Mark Galeotti, academic chair of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, a historian who’s spent his career tracking organized crime in the former Soviet Union. “But it’s clear that there was an understanding. We can’t pay you, so sell what you need to in order to get by. At this point, you’ve got Russian fields being plowed by ‘tractors’ that are basically Red Army tanks with the turrets yanked off and a piece of metal soldered over the hole. So in that context, you want an Il-76? Sure!”

  At the same moment, the masses of ordnance, ammunition, planes, vehicles, and supplies returning from former Soviet bases abroad had become problematic. If there was a shortage of homes for the airmen, there were certainly no facilities to house the gear being repatriated in a procession of trucks, Il-76s, Antonovs, and ships from erstwhile Soviet garrisons in East Germany, Poland, Central Asia, the Baltic states, the Caucasus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and further afield. Between the announcement of withdrawal and the last arms-laden Candid leaving East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport in 1994, it was widely understood that anyone who could make a buck for himself by disposing of some of the “load” would be doing everyone a favor.

  The sheer scale of this pilfering from the world’s greatest arms stockpile is staggering. “Ukraine, where [notorious illicit cargo baron and gunrunner to Liberia, Leonid] Minin came from, is a great example, like all the former satellite republics,” wrote PBS’s Frontline World journalist Matthew Brunwasser. “During the Soviet era the Second Soviet Army was based in Kiev as part of the Soviet Union’s defense strategy against a western NATO attack. Ukraine was equipped to maintain a standing army of 800,000—almost three times the size of Ukraine’s military today. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited these Soviet stockpiles of military goods intended for a military far larger than Ukraine’s.”

  In practice, that means that in Ukraine alone military equipment, weapons, and transport sufficient for 630,000 troops was now officially “surplus”—and fair game for anyone with enough cash and chutzpah. Colonel Oleg Belosludtsev estimates that a staggering 80 percent of all arms exports made after 1991 were through these “shadowy,” mafialike dealing networks that grew up around the old military bases.

  Kremlin mandarin General Alexander Lebed went so far as to claim the entire Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994 was simply a cover for the massive corruption in military high command. “These so-called generals needed a big war to break out somewhere,” he admitted, “so that a large number of armored vehicles could be ‘written off.’ ” Armored columns would leave for Grozny; an unusually high number of tanks, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers (RPGs), ammo, whatever, would be “damaged” on the journey, written off, and replacements sent for. Those “damaged” goods, in pristine condition, would then be sold to whichever broker could meet them on a lonely Chechen road and take delivery.

  It was the fire sale of the century. Many of those who had access to the stockpiles simply sold their booty on, becoming dealers either in the “legitimate” marketplace, to Western companies looking to buy up cheap APCs, guns, armor, and aircraft, or to contacts in the rapidly growing local mafia organizations—men like Minin, giving mobsters prime access to former Soviet army stockpiles reclassified as “surplus” small arms. Within a couple of years, defense trade magazines such as the one I was working on were suddenly full of hurriedly written, blurry display ads for MiG fighters and other nearly new defense hardware placed by men like my friend “the Contact.”

  With uncanny speed, the mafia infiltrated the higher ranks of the military, developing a broad network of suppliers, collaborators, and commanding officers with enough clout to sign off military equipment by the truckload. Writing perfectly good equipment off as “damaged in transit” was a favored method, as it kept not only the buyers happy but the government’s suppliers too: the perfect win-win situation and, if they could only forget about the end use for the weapons, a seemingly victimless crime. Enlisted men further down the ladder like Mickey’s loose band of associates set up in business—as private security guards, as mercenaries, as drivers … and as freelance transport outfits.

  So if these reports are correct, then what on earth was an honest soldier like Shaposhnikov—a hero to many, whose good standing, integrity, and trustworthiness were such that President Boris Yeltsin entrusted Russia’s “nuclear red button” codes to him for safekeeping—thinking?

  “These activities were intended to provide men and officers with free food and goods from local farmers and businessmen,” he confirms today. And despite his protestations that “the first post-Soviet winter was difficult for everyone, including our military and air force, but I was impressed that our personnel and operational readiness was up to the mark … discipline and loyalty mean a lot to our men,” Shaposhnikov himself must have felt that aside from being a discreet way of helping the boys, this colossal military fire sale was arguably the only means left of averting something even more explosive than an arms free-for-all: an all-out armed-forces mutiny.

  Russia had endured one attempted coup, the previous year when, in August 1991, government members opposed to President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms had imprisoned him and used troops to surround the Soviet White House in Moscow. Supreme Soviet Chairman Boris Yeltsin led popular protests against the coup, climbing a tank to deliver a speech denouncing the plotters. It is widely believed that it was only the entreaties of Shaposhnikov (who says he “enjoyed very good working and personal relations with Yeltsin”) that turned the tide, forcing the soldiers’ climb down. But now the men, unpaid, unfed, cold, and increasingly disaffected, were restive. The specter of hundreds of thousands of highly trained, desperate, and starving servicemen and ex-servicemen turning on their masters was, for a short time, a very real one; and a mutinous air force capable of carrying nuclear warheads and troops anywhere, anytime, would have been a prospect too dark to contemplate in a state all too conscious of the possibilities of armed revolution.

  The writing was on the wall. Arms, planes, equipment, and men were going AWOL anyway, and given the choice between allowing the men at least a piece of the action or forcing mutiny and civil war, one can only speculate that Shaposhnikov effectively had no choice. His colleague, Minister for Privatization Anatoly Chubais, said, “We did not have a choice between an ideal transition to a market economy and a criminalized transition. Our choice was between a criminalized transition and civil war.”

  As for Mickey’s team of airmen, they were still in their twenties and thirties but already carried the skills, scars, habits, hardship-forged contacts, and thousand-yard stares they’d brought back from the war in Afghanistan—today, Shaposhnikov calls it “the Russian version of Vietnam syndrome.” For them, the sudden collapse in prospects for the army and air force combined with feverish talk of rich rewards to be made in the burgeoning private sector. Their families were hungry; they themselves had frequently been forced to survive on their wits by foraging and bartering what petty goods th
ey could steal. Now, finally, with the fire sale they had a shot at something bigger.

  With the service descending into chaos, the country on its knees, and rich incentives on offer to join the global movement of goods and capital into, between, and from the lands of the erstwhile Soviet Union, the question for these boys wasn’t if they’d use their skills to go into business, but how.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Machine

  Post-Soviet Russia, Early 1990s

  THE GUNS, AMMUNITION, PLANES, EVEN NUCLEAR WARHEADS flowed out of the military stores, the bases and the silos, even straight off the factory lines and into the hands of anyone with a good contact, a bill to pay, or a score to settle. But for Mickey and his comrades, turning the free-for-all into a worthwhile business would take all the wiles, expertise, and perseverance they’d learned flying their endless sorties over Afghanistan. It would also take the right plane.

  After years of neglecting the wider economy in favor of military might, the former Soviet Union now faced a downhill race, just as Mikhail Gorbachev had predicted, to liquidate as many of these assets as possible, as quickly as possible. Warheads, tanks, bullets, guns, jet fighters, ships, grenade launchers, transport planes, the lot.

  Arms manufacturers, sensing the approach of a drastic liberalization of the economy, began to adapt to market conditions. But their production lines, used to working toward targets outlined in five-year plans, couldn’t react fast enough. Commissioned by a suddenly bankrupt army, dozens of Soviet monster aircraft—Ilyushins, Tupolevs, and Antonovs—often made it no further than the post-assembly depots, left to rust in their dozens outside factories and on silent, abandoned airfields across Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Faced with the option—sell them and claw back some cash for yourself, or let them rust—their guardians were only too pleased to let them go to whomever came knocking. But if a new model was still too much—well, there were also plenty of combat-worn planes in various states of airworthiness to be bought, leased, or borrowed on very favorable terms, solo or crew included, from the armed forces themselves.

  For a team like Mickey’s, trained to a high level but with only one skill to speak of, taking to the skies again in a repainted Il-76 felt, he says, “like getting back to business as usual after all the worry.” They had the plane, the crew, and, in the burgeoning black markets of former Soviet states, no end of demand for discreet, speedy transportation to satisfy.

  Suddenly, and to this day exactly how remains a mystery, these men with no money of their own and a few solid army connections were in business. They flew whatever came their way, from that first “liberated” Candid in Kazakhstan to whatever hastily assembled patchworks of leased engines and borrowed airframes someone had losing money on a parking berth and wanted crewed. They flew for others and flew whatever unlisted cargo they could for themselves: pilot fish for the new breed of sharks that were suddenly circling international waters. And they soon found they had three “invisible” competitive advantages that would prove crucial as their business activities grew.

  The first was a vast, loyal contact network. With ex-Soviet military and crew stationed everywhere from the coast of Afghanistan to Angola, they enjoyed the benefits of the world’s biggest old-boy club. For discreet missions at short notice, reliable recommendations—preferably not just for capable crew, but the right sort of people—were often the only way to staff up extra charters. And reliable connections on the ground at destination were often the only way to ensure customs could either be successfully negotiated—or negotiated with.

  The second subtle advantage enjoyed by ex-Soviet airmen taking to the privatized skies was a deep knowledge of mission terrain that went way beyond most other pilots’. Between 1979 and 1991, Soviet Il-76 pilots made more than 14,700 flights into Afghanistan, transporting 786,200 service personnel and 315,800 tons of freight. Soviet support for proxy regimes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America like Angola, Cuba, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, and Chile throughout the Cold War meant a large number of the pilots knew more about the airstrips, weather, terrain, and even local infrastructure, customs, and connections than anyone quite realized.

  The killer difference, though, was in these DIY import-export barons’ relationship with their aircraft. After all, having trained, graduated, captained, and seen active service in Il-76s throughout their careers, often fixing engines by hand and stripping down the interiors to accommodate more men or equipment under duress and in sometimes extreme conditions, they knew their plane like it was part of them. And that meant they knew its hidden secrets.

  Today, British aviation consultant Brian Johnson-Thomas sits on the UN’s panels of experts on the traffic in destabilizing commodities throughout the world. But as an investigative journalist and former flight manager, he’s witnessed these crews’ sheer grit, talent, and ingenuity up close. He’s also come to admire them, cautioning me when we meet that they are among the finest aviators he’s ever seen, and “certainly no worse than anyone else when it comes to moral choices.” A strapping, white-bearded fiftysomething with a soft Celtic burr and a tweed jacket, he cuts an incongruous figure among the bony, glazed faces of the former Soviet crews and deathtrap planes with whom he flew for years for NGOs and monitoring groups. This experience has given him a rare insider’s view of their operations … and their hardware.

  “People who don’t actually fly them don’t realize that Il-76s especially have all these hidden advantages to them,” he says. “For example, they can load and unload, land and take off without any ground assistance, so whatever you do, you don’t need anyone else’s help. But the real surprise for me was the hidden spaces. Nobody ever looked beyond the cargo hold—not once—but it’s an open secret among the crews that there are all these spaces down in the belly of the plane. You’re flying these things all over the world, and nobody but you knows that there’s a good fifteen tons of stowage beyond what it says on the operator’s manual.

  “Even customs officials, who check cargo off every day, don’t ever fly in these things. They have the contents on the cargo manifest, and they tally with the maximum load on the spec. Then, if they stop for a moment, they’ll do the maths and sure enough, the manifest takes the plane up to Maximum Take Off Weight. They expect a single hold space, and that’s what they’re shown, and they tick off what’s in it, and that’s their job. Beyond that, they don’t have the time or the resources. A customs official in the third world might get paid five U.S. dollars a day, on a good day. They aren’t likely to stop and arrest and generally make life difficult for the people who fly in and give them a bottle of vodka or case of cigarettes that will fetch five times that on the black market.”

  It was perfect. It quickly dawned that “the people who’d check the cargo against what we’d say we were carrying had never flown the plane—they hadn’t a fucking clue, quite honestly,” tuts Sergei.

  “They’d look at the manual, see that 192 tons was the maximum takeoff weight, and sixty tons of that was cargo. When that sixty tons had been loaded up and accounted for, they’d sign it off! But the thing is, we can carry fifteen tons more under the floor. Maybe sixteen, if we’re feeling lucky. You have to start a little way back on the runway because it’ll take you that much more power to get airborne, but you can do it. Well, we can.”

  So long as they didn’t want to carry all the standard escape equipment that would normally fill those chambers, they had the perfect smuggler’s vessel. Not only did the plane itself have what amounted to a fake bottom to it; because of Soviet secrecy around its military, the only people who knew it was even there were the engineers, and the airmen who flew it. And they were hardly likely to ruin a good thing by telling.

  So now Mickey, like everybody else with a plane to fly and a living to make in that first desperate burst of free enterprise, just had to figure out a) what openly declared cargo jobs they would take on, and b) what illicit cargo a man of his skill could get away with carrying, for the right price.


  For Mickey himself, of course, there was a third question. What hidden extra cargo, in the spaces of the Candid that not even his bosses knew about, would make him the most illicit cash in hand on each journey?

  He needed to figure it out quickly. The crews were in high demand. The year was 1992 and things were changing. The Cold War was over, and the free market had trumped ideology. Meanwhile (and thanks largely to the glut of small arms suddenly flooding the market), small, bloody, internecine conflicts were spreading across Southern Europe and Africa.

  By 1992, the former Yugoslavia had began its ugly descent into all-out sectarian war: Croatia and Slovenia, having declared independence, were recognized by some Western governments and began looking at what they could take with them, while Serbia geared up to prevent more secession, by force if necessary. On the edges of the old Soviet Union, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan were plunged into civil war. Libyan-armed Tuareg rebels were opposing government forces in Mali. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan had collapsed to the same mujahideen resistance fighters who had seen off the Soviets. Rebel militias were running riot in Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, the Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Algeria, and Uganda. And in the Caucasian borderlands of Russia itself, another ex-Soviet air force Afghan-war veteran and Chechen separatist named Dzhokhar Dudayev was about to declare independence from the motherland and sign a law giving all Chechens the right to bear arms against their oppressors.

  And for Mickey’s crew, finding the answers to those questions would lead them into close contact with some of the worst people, and most hair-raising places, on earth.

  Suddenly there was a new mission on the board.

  IF THE SOVIET Union was broken—and veterans still refer to the snowballing chaos of 1992 as “the Cataclysm”—its former pilots were unstoppable.